Global consulting revenue crossed $1 trillion in 2025, Markets Herald reported. A decade ago, the milestone would have signaled industry strength. Today it points to a quieter shift: clients are bypassing the large generalist firms that once defined the field, and turning instead to smaller specialist practices. Florida-based management consultant Nicholas Mukhtar has watched the change from inside it.
Mukhtar runs Tera Strategies, a Fort Lauderdale consultancy that serves founders, family offices, and mid-size firms. His own path, from public health into private-sector advisory, is itself a marker of the trend. Today’s market rewards advisors with unusual lenses, not generic ones.
Why the Mid-Market Is Reshaping
A Nextcontinent report published in mid-2025 described the strategy consulting sector as undergoing “moderate recovery that remains fragile and uneven.” Smaller, more agile firms appeared to be weathering the disruption better than their larger competitors. Why is not complicated. When a 200-person engagement team is hired to solve a problem that requires five people with industry-specific fluency, the mismatch shows up in the work.
AlphaSense, a market intelligence platform, put the shift in starker terms. “The era of generalist consulting is coming to an end,” the firm said in an analysis of the independent consulting market. Independent contractors earning over $100,000 a year grew from 3 million to 4.7 million across four years, a 57 percent increase.
How Clients Are Choosing Differently
Mukhtar does not frame the change as small firms beating big ones. He frames it as a question of fit. “There’s really two buckets,” he told Interview.net. “There’s companies that kind of know what they need and just need the extra hands… Then there’s the companies that don’t know what they need.”
His own practice tends to attract the second group. A founder who already has the diagnosis can hire bodies and scale. A founder still working to identify the root cause needs a partner who can think in systems and ask uncomfortable questions before any deliverable is produced. The first group can absorb a generalist team. The second group rarely can.
What Sets Smaller Firms Apart
The independent consulting model offers something large firms have struggled to replicate at scale: speed of insight, accountability that runs through one decision-maker, and pricing that does not have to support partner-track overhead. Mid-size clients are noticing.
The shift has hit traditional firms in ways that show up in their own data. Large firms are reorganizing practice areas, cutting bench, and bidding more aggressively for engagements that, ten years ago, would have come to them by default. Growth among specialist independents has compressed the addressable market and changed how clients evaluate fit.
What Mukhtar Brings to the Diagnosis
Mukhtar’s own background is the kind of credential that translates into the new market. Florida Independent details a path that explains why: he founded Healthy Detroit, a public health nonprofit that grew to a $15 million annual budget and was recognized by the American Public Health Association in 2017. He earned dual master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins as a Bloomberg Fellow and advised the White House Office of American Innovation before founding Tera Strategies.
That history gives him a framework most business consultants don’t have: the habit of tracing symptoms back to systems rather than treating them in isolation. Executives who want pattern-recognition, not a deck, are increasingly looking for advisors who can offer it. That market is what specialists like Mukhtar inherit as the generalist model contracts.
